“I’d never imagined in my wildest dreams this would ­ever happen,” Norden said, sitting on a bench outside the Beth Israel Deaconess emergency room Monday night.

As she looked at her feet, with socks mismatched ­because she had dressed so quickly to leave the house, tears fell to the sidewalk.

“I feel sick,” she said. “I think I could pass out.”

She had yet to see either son, because doctors had not authorized visitors. Both are graduates of Stoneham High School and had been laid off recently from their jobs as roofers. The oldest, age 33, still lives in Stoneham, the younger in Wakefield. Both are avid fishermen.

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If you can stomach it, there are photos that are (warning–contains some graphic images including one which requires you to click on it to see {I didn’t do so]) collected there.

We are truly saddened by the news that just came regarding the explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Along with you I grieve for those that lost their lives and their families, and for those injured in this tragic event. In moments like this, we do not know what to say or how to say it, but will you join me in the prayer of the psalmist, “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in times of trouble.” (Ps.46:1).

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The Mass was celebrated as if from centuries past: A bearded priest veiled in incense chanted for grace in a church along the Nile, near the spot where Christians believe Jesus and his mother sought refuge in an earlier age of bloodshed and uncertainty.

Marianne Samir knelt and prayed for the Coptic Christians killed in a spasm of sectarian violence that has further shaken a nation engulfed in economic and political anxieties.

“I feel unsafe,” said Samir, a high school philosophy teacher with a cross tattooed on her wrist. “The Islamists want war. They want strife. But this is our land too. It is a country blessed by God, and there’s no way we’ll leave it to them.”

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An Anglican Communion clergy[man], Godwin Daramola, has condemned the Nigerian government for its inability to prevent many woes befalling the nation.

Mr. Daramola, who delivered the sermon at the 10th year remembrance service held in honour of Atinuke Ige, late daughter of the slain Governor of the old Oyo State and former Attorney-General of the Federation, Bola Ige, at the St. Anne’s Church, Molete, Ibadan on Wednesday, identified some of the social ills defying government’s efforts as corruption, insecurity, materialism and selfishness.

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The leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church accused President Mohamed Morsi’s government on Tuesday of “delinquency” and “misjudgments” for failing to prevent sectarian street-fighting that escalated into an attack on the church’s main cathedral after a funeral mass over the weekend, leaving at least six Christians dead.

“This is the first time the main Coptic Orthodox Cathedral has been attacked in Egypt’s history,” the church leader, Pope Tawadros II, said in a television interview, faulting Mr. Morsi’s government for failing to act fast enough to control the violence.

Direct criticism of the government by an Egyptian church leader was all but unheard-of under former President Hosni Mubarak, whose ouster two years ago ended the fear of reprisals from the authorities that had helped silence church officials and others. But the pope’s comments also highlighted the growing anxieties among Christian leaders about the subsequent rise to power of Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his Islamist allies.

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(Via email–KSH) 11 April 2013

My dear Friends,

Greetings in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ!

The situation in Cairo is very sad for us as a Christian community. On Friday 6 April 2013, sectarian clashes erupted once again, this time in El Khosus, in the outskirts of Cairo. The story, according to the director of the police, started by a 12-year old Muslim boy drawing graffiti on the wall of an Islamic school. Two Muslim men rebuked him for doing so, and a Christian man also came and rebuked him. This developed into a big argument and fighting between Christians and Muslims in the area. After the Friday prayers in the mosque, a group of Muslims came out and attacked the Coptic Orthodox church in the area. The result of this was the killing of four Christians and one Muslim, and many injured. Many stores were also vandalized and looted. The Grand Imam sent his assistant, together with a Coptic Orthodox bishop, in order to do a reconciliation. However, one hour after things calmed down, the fighting erupted again.
The next day there was a funeral at the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Abassayia the center of Cairo for the Christians who died. Thousands of Christians attended the funeral. Amidst their mourning and grief they were shouting words against the government and against the Muslim Brotherhood. Because of this, as they exited the Cathedral and the church grounds, they were attacked by other Muslims. The police then interfered throwing tear gas. At least one person was killed with over 80 injured. This was the first time in history that the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral was attacked, especially during a time of mourning.

It is worth mentioning that in the last two years, since the beginning of the Revolution of 2011, the number of incidents of sectarian clashes has increased. No one who committed violence or killing has been brought to justice because the government is content to solve the sectarian clashes by reconciliatory meetings. In a statement I made, I urged the government to apply the rule of law as the only way to stop these sectarian clashes. I emphasized the importance of the reconciliatory meetings which we as an Anglican Church are facilitating at several levels. I also emphasized that they are not a substitute to the application of the law. Unfortunately the current government is inexperienced and is not doing enough to include the different political parties in building up Egypt after the Revolution.This contributed to the instability of the Egyptian society, the decrease of tourism, and the bad economic situation.

The Christian community in Egypt right now is mourning and feels challenged in their own country, as some of them have said, “we have been here since the time of the Pharaohs, this is our country! We will not leave whatever happens. ” On the other hand, there are many educated young people who are immigrating out of the country and this is the saddest thing for me as one of the leaders of the church in Egypt, because I believe that the Christian presences is very much liked with the Christian witness.

May the Lord bless you!

–(The Most Rev.) Dr. Mouneer Hanna Anis is Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican Diocese of Egypt with North Africa and the Horn of Africa and President Bishop of the Episcopal / AnglicanProvince of Jerusalem and the Middle East

“Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.” So asserted German Chancellor Angela Merkel late last year, causing a stir. Merkel echoed a concern expressed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who warned in a 2011 speech that Christians face a “particularly wicked program of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing.”

Now, this is not about clerks who say “Happy Holidays” or bans of nativity scenes in public schools. Merkel spoke of real persecution of hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. Indeed, a 2011 Pew Forum study found that Christians are harassed in 130 countries, more than any of the world’s other religions.

The just-released book Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians provides the gory details behind these statistics….

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The President of AYF, Wuse Archdeaconry Council, Barrister Isaac Harrison stated this during a workshop organised for youth, with the theme; “Empowered To Impact The World”, in Abuja.

According to him, “We cannot grant amnesty to people we do not know, we cannot also grant amnesty to people who had already made up their minds that whether there is dialogue or not, they will go on with whatever they are doing, If Boko Haram actually need peace, they will not be killing those that are moving towards that peace.

Read it all.

At least five people were killed Saturday in clashes between Muslims and Christians, raising new questions over whether President Mohamed Morsi’s Islamist-led government can calm sectarian tensions amid Egypt’s broader political unrest.

Violence between Muslims and Coptic Christians over the last year has been a troubling subplot, especially in the provinces, to the nation’s post-revolutionary political division and faltering economy. There were conflicting accounts over what ignited the latest fighting in Khousous, an impoverished town north of Cairo.

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In 2004 Sandra and I flew to the northernmost part of Uganda to visit a couple of theological seminaries in the city of Arua. The Ugandan seminary was relatively well appointed. Its faculty joyful. Its students adequately fed and eager to learn. The Sudanese seminary, across town, was a study in contrasts. Bare buildings, dirt floors, underfed students, listless faculty were all testimony to the suffering of Sudanese people who had sought refuge across the Uganda border to save their lives.

Today South Sudan is its own country, thanks to the accord in 2011, by which 8 million Sudanese ”“ mostly African and Christian (as opposed to northern Sudanese who are Arab and Muslim) ”“ ceded from Sudan. People like the seminarians we saw are now moving back home and rebuilding the decimated southern part of the country. When we lived in Pittsburgh we got to know many of the so-called “Lost Boys” who had come to America back in the 1980’s and ”˜90’s as refugees. Beautiful young men, many of them had seen the most brutal atrocities the human mind can imagine.

These atrocities are paraded across the wide-screen in a new movie from Relativity Media called Machine Gun Preacher. Starring Gerard Butler as Sam Childers and Michelle Monagan as his longsuffering wife Lynn, the movie tells the true story of one man’s effort to help the suffering children of Sudan….

Read it all.

Primate of the Church of Nigeria, (Anglican Communion), Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, yesterday stated that there was an evil force behind the Boko Haram sect.

Okoh said this in his sermon, titled “Alleluia! Christ is Risen”, at the Easter Sunday service of the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Life Camp, Gwarimpa, Abuja.

He said the dreaded group is challenged to the good fortunes of Nigeria., assuring that it shall soon become history.

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Church burnings, attacks on worshippers and suicide bombings in Nigeria are a recent phenomenon that threatens the longstanding harmony between Muslims and Christians, warned Nigeria’s new cardinal.

“(This) is all new to us,” Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, archbishop of Abuja, told MPs and Senators of the Canada Holy See Friendship Group Feb. 4.

“We didn’t think it would ever happen.”

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Our news media suffer from a terrible supply-side problem. The number of people paid to offer opinions greatly outstrips the number of things worth having an opinion about. Even now, several weeks after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, I don’t think the slaughter was the kind of event toward which one can profitably form an interesting point of view. Leaving church one morning, so the story goes, the great Coolidge was asked the subject of his pastor’s sermon. “Sin,” Coolidge replied. And what did the pastor say about sin? “He said he was ag’in it.” Some things don’t require much elaboration.

In an important sense””in the literal sense””what happened at Sandy Hook was unspeakable, which is why, I suppose, the public disputations that followed it were a towering jumble of non sequitur and irrelevance, a rodeo of hobby horses ridden by straw men. The disputations began even before the authorities had released a final count of victims. Indeed, at the time, good information was hard to come by. For as much as 10 hours after the first reporters arrived on the scene, print and TV journalists were misreporting the killer’s name, his place of residence, his relationship to the elementary school, his mother’s line of work, the types and source of the guns he used, the reaction of school officials in the immediate aftermath of the crime””the long string of mistakes we have come to expect when the compulsion to get it first overwhelms the need to get it right.

The slaughter at Sandy Hook wasn’t merely a rebuke to politics or law enforcement or government regulation–it was a rebuke to our desperate hope that evil can be destroyed, or at least quarantined.

–From the February 2013 issue of Commentary, pages 63-64

Leaders at an Islamic summit on Thursday urged a dialogue between the Syrian opposition and regime just as a new initiative for talks proposed by an anti-government leader appeared to be unraveling.

Like previous diplomatic initiatives on Syria, opposition chief Mouaz al-Khatib’s call for talks made less than a week ago appeared doomed to failure. And with troops and rebels clashing for a second day around Damascus, frustrated Syrians dismissed the calls for dialogue as empty talk.

“All of this does not concern us,” said Iyad, a Syrian fighter on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, which has witnessed heavy fighting in the last two days.

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Growing up as the youngest of seven children in the historic city of Hama in Syria, George Shalhoub led an idyllic life in which he says Muslims and Christians lived together peacefully.

“We lived in a neighborhood that is called the Christian quarter, surrounded by Muslim neighborhoods,” recalled Shalhoub, 63, founder and pastor of St. Mary Antiochian Orthodox Church in Livonia. “We played in their mosques, and they played in the courtyard of our church. We were safe. We visited each other, and were part of each other’s lives. I never once felt discriminated against by the Muslims.

“It was the happiest time of my life.”

But over the last two years, the civil war has unraveled the threads that bind society in Hama and other places in Syria, leading to sectarian strife and bloodshed. Last month, Shalhoub learned that the daughter, son-in-law and grandson of his 95-year-old hometown priest, Rev. Rafael Basha, were killed.

The discovery added another layer of sorrow for Shalhoub, who often prays for reconciliation in his native land….

Read it all.

A proposal to arm Syrian rebels was backed by the Pentagon, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but the White House decided not to act on the plan, reflecting the extent of divisions over the U.S. role in the bloody conflict.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Marine Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Mr. Obama’s top military adviser, revealed publicly for the first time at a Senate hearing on Thursday that they supported a proposal last year by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA director Gen. David Petraeus.

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The destruction of the sixth-century monumental Buddha statues of Bamiyan in March 2001 by the Taliban shocked many persons concerned with the preservation of world cultural legacy. Such examples of iconoclasm were not new in Islamic history. In the name of the restoration of the purity of the faith, groups with similar persuasions have destroyed Sufi and Shiite shrines in various parts of the Arabian Peninsula during the nineteenth and twentieth century. But until very recently, few observers believed that such examples of iconoclasm will ever reach the Sahel. Although the Sahelian countries had overwhelming Muslim populations, Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa was believed to be peaceful compared to elsewhere in the Arab World. In most of the twentieth century, no armed Islamic group was to be found anywhere in the Sahel. Very few Sub-Saharans trained in Afghanistan during the Soviet Occupation or joined Al-Qaida, and suicide bombing was unheard of until a few years ago. This is not so much because intolerant Islamic groups were not to be found in the Sahel, but they had neither the sophistication nor the logistical and financial resources to challenge state power.

In recent years, a variety of jihadi groups have appeared in the Sahel, the Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahidin in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Movement for Unicity and Jihad in West Africa. Recently, these groups have linked up with AQIM which provided them with sophisticated military training and substantial financial and logistical resources….

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Sitting in the living room of his home in Erbil, capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, 63-year-old Rostom Sefarian stops talking, struggling to hold back the tears. It was July 2006 and Sefarian, an Armenian Christian living in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, had been kidnapped by a group of Islamic fundamentalists ”” the latest victim in a series of abductions and killings of Iraqi Christians that continues to this day.

Sefarian was released five days later, when his family agreed to pay a $72,000 (U.S.) ransom. It was the second time Sefarian had been kidnapped; his family paid $12,000 to free him after one day in captivity the previous January. His wife’s cousin, also a Christian, was not as lucky: three days after being kidnapped, he was found dead by his family.

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Imagine you were forced to leave your home? Given no option but to pack everything into one bag and to leave Northern Ireland.
That is exactly the situation that more than 500,000 Syrians have been forced into.

Into Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan they continue to pour, in search of safety and shelter from the bombs and bullets that have killed 60,000 people. Three-and-a-half thousand crossed into Jordan last Wednesday alone.

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According to the Assad regime, Israeli warplanes have violated Syrian airspace and bombed a scientific research facility. According to Western security sources, the attack was against a convoy of sophisticated heavy weapons destined for Lebanon and Hezbollah. Israel itself is saying nothing; nor, officially, is the US. For all the obfuscation and confusion, however, what is chillingly clear is the danger of Syria’s vicious civil war spilling over into a regional conflict.

The situation inside the country is dismaying enough. More than 60,000 people have been killed in the near two years since the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad began. Although the regime’s grip is weakening, the fight only gets bloodier; and as many as four million civilians have been displaced ”“ many of whom are now starving, freezing and dying from disease.

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Prime Minister David Cameron has said the international community should use “everything at its disposal” to fight terrorism, on a visit to Algeria.

The recent hostage crisis, in which some 37 foreigners died, was “a reminder that what happens in other countries affects us at home”, he said.

He also defended Western intervention in the conflict in neighbouring Mali.

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The Holy Orthodox Christian Faith is unabashedly pro-life. The Lord Jesus Christ was recognized and worshipped in His mother’s womb while yet unborn by the Holy Forerunner who was also still in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:44); St. Basil the Great (4th Century), one of the universal teachers of the faith, dared to call murderers those who terminate the life of the fetus. The Church has consistently held that children developing in the womb should be afforded every protection given to those outside the womb. There is no moral, religious or scientific rationale which can justify making a distinction between the humanity of the newly-conceived and that of the newly-born.

Abortion on demand not only ends the life of a child, but also injures the mother of that child, often resulting in spiritual, psychological and physical harm. Christians should bring the comfort of the Gospel to women who have had abortions, that our loving God may heal them. The Orthodox Church calls on her children, and indeed all of society, to provide help to pregnant mothers who need assistance brining their children safely into the world and providing these children loving homes.

On the occasion of this sorrowful anniversary, and as we mourn the violence we all too often visit upon one another, as exemplified by the recent mass killings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut, we pray for an end to the violence of abortion. Surely the many ways in which we as a people diminish the reverence and respect for human life underlie much of this violence. The disrespect for human life in the womb is no small part of this. Let us offer to Almighty God our repentance for the evil of abortion on demand and extend our hearts and hands to embrace life.

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Bishop in Jerusalem, Bp Suheil Dawani has spoken out against sexual violence affecting women and children escaping Syria and criticised “archaic attitudes” to women that dominate the region.

In a piece written for ACNS, the Bishop says the crisis in Syria “requires urgent action” and noted that Christians “cannot be silent [witnesses] to the brutal treatment of women and children”.

He wrote: “The UN has reported that 2.5 million people have fled their homes. Many are women and children who are fleeing in fear from the ongoing sexual violence against them. The International Rescue Committee reports that those who finally make it into the refugee camps are also victimized.

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For the past two decades, in a small town in southern Italy, a pianist and music teacher has been hunting for and resurrecting the music of the dead.

Francesco Lotoro has found thousands of songs, symphonies and operas written in concentration, labor and POW camps in Germany and elsewhere before and during World War II.

By rescuing compositions written in imprisonment, Lotoro wants to fill the hole left in Europe’s musical history and show how even the horrors of the Holocaust could not suppress artistic inspiration.

You can read it but it is a must-listen-to it all entry. Stunningly powerful.

Police dogs checking for explosives at St George’s Anglican Church, Tunis, on Sunday, were “a healthy reminder that we live in volatile times”, the Area Bishop for North Africa, Dr Bill Musk, said on Tuesday. He spoke in the wake of an attack by Islamist terrorists in Algeria in which 37 hostages were killed, and a warning by the Prime Minister that North African states had become “a magnet for jihadists”.

Addressing Parliament on Monday, Mr Cameron said that the “murderous violence” perpetrated by the terrorists at the remote Tigantourine gas complex in the Saharan desert last week required a “strong security response”. Britain was engaged in a “generational struggle against an ideology which is an extreme distortion of the Islamic faith”.

Clergy had mixed views on the implications of Mr Cameron’s speech for Christians.

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A panel of African civil society leaders, including Bishop Andudu Adam Elnail, were joined today by the former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, Dr. Mukesh Kapila, in urging African political leaders to use the upcoming African Union (AU) Summit in Addis Ababa to end the humanitarian suffering in Sudan’s Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states.

The panel identified the January 25 Heads of State meeting on Sudan as a key test of the AU’s “credibility” and urged African leaders to recognise the importance of addressing the conflict in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile for wider regional security.

Having just returned from a visit to the region, Dr Kapila called for an independent commission of enquiry into the conflict amongst warnings of “ethnic cleansing”.

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A Kenyan priest has appealed to Christians around the world to pray for the people of Garissa, a violence-stricken city in the North Eastern Province of Kenya.
The Revd Canon Francis Omondi’s plea comes after at least five people were killed and four others wounded by Somali Islamist group al-Shabab who opened fire on guests at one of the city’s local hotels, The Dunes on 16 January.
Al-Shabab””a clan-based insurgent and terrorist group””has continued its violent insurgency in the area with Christians and security personnel being the main targets of the attacks.

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In their 10 years of marriage, there had been warning signs, but nothing to prepare her for this bloody struggle. The verbal abuse had finally led to their separation in December. Still, he had never hit her.

Not long after, though, things took a troubling, sinister turn when he told her something that made her afraid.

“He was going to kill himself and take somebody with him,” she said.

He said it looking straight at her. She feared she was the someone he meant.

(Please note: the full content here may not be suitable for all blog readers). Read it all.

The personal and the pastoral…both inform Ms. [Rita] Brock’s work. She writes about her father in her recent book “Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War.” Her co-author, Gabriella Lettini, is a theologian whose extended family includes veterans emotionally damaged by wartime experience. In the Soul Repair Center, Ms. Brock collaborates with the Rev. Herman Keizer Jr., who was an Army chaplain for 40 years.

Over the past three years, Ms. Brock and Ms. Lettini have spoken about moral injury and soul repair at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting and at denominational gatherings of Presbyterians and Unitarian Universalists.

Now, with a $650,000 two-year grant from the Lilly Endowment and the formal support of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Soul Repair Center is beginning to teach congregational leaders how to address moral injury in veterans. The first such training session will take place in early February.

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A coalition of leading human rights activists and scholars has asked that Congress press the Obama administration to end the growing humanitarian crisis in the largely Christian areas of southern Sudan, saying that the administration’s response to the crisis has been non-existent.

U.S. policy toward the continuing human tragedy in Sudan is “in the worst place it’s ever been,” said Mark C. Hackett, CEO and executive director of Memphis-based Operation Broken Silence. “It’s extremely disappointing.”

Hackett and other activists ”” at a Jan. 11 forum organized by the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. ”” said that they had spent Jan. 10-11 on Capitol Hill calling for the United States to intervene to stop the systematic attacks of villagers in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan by the forces of President Omar al-Bashir.

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